The ‘feminist’ pornographer from Bromley and what women really want to watch

The ‘feminist’ pornographer from Bromley and what women really want to watch

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'I’m making porn from a female perspective': Anna Arrowsmith, who directs under the name Anna Span, at her home in Kent

PHOTO MATT WRITTLE

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Hollywood bound: porn star and director James Deen

Getty

Well, there goes my porn virginity. “Watch porn” was never on my “Do before you’re 30” list, but with a month to go I have just knocked it off, as it were, and spent a weekday evening viewing A and O Department by feminist porn director Anna Arrowsmith. All in the name of research, of course.

Later this month Arrowsmith, who makes hardcore pornography under the name Anna Span, will argue for the motion in an Intelligence2 debate that “pornography is good for us”.

In response to the arguments of many feminists, such as the anti-pornography activist Gail Dines who says, “In pornography nobody makes love. They all make hate,” Arrowsmith says instead of “silencing sexual imagery” we need “lots of imagery, more imagery. It’s not about the porn stopping us doing other things, it’s about the other images being there too — such as imagery of women as powerful politicians, for example.”

I meet 41-year-old Arrowsmith at her home in the Kent countryside — itself disrupting my stereotypes. Her small cottage which embraces you with heat from its fireplaces, low ceilings and exposed beams hardly seems the place for a woman who used to audition her male actors by asking them to masturbate in front of her. Today she is in jeans and slippers, her two pedigree whippets, Kipper and Biscuit, tailing her through the house.

Despite the soft appearances, I’m yet to be convinced by the concept of “feminist pornography”. There’s a reason I’m a porn novice — I’ve always considered the idea of watching anything where the most common catchphrases, I understand, are along the lines of “Does your pussy like that, bitch?” to be offensive to women.

Yet Arrowsmith explains “figures say 30 per cent of all online porn is consumed by women” so clearly plenty of girls out there don’t think like me. Spurring on that market is James Deen, the US porn actor turned Hollywood star who will appear in Bret Easton Ellis’s screenwriting debut, The Canyons, later this year. The appeal of his boy-next-door looks to women has been credited with turning him into a porn superstar.

This shift in the porn audience, says Arrowsmith, “happened at a time when women have more power and it’s key because they are reacting against the second wave [feminism] that said you had to reject sexuality and sexual imagery in order to be a strong woman”.

What that backlash meant for Arrowsmith was leaving Central St Martins art college in 1998 with the resolve to change the porn industry from the inside out.

Arrowsmith grew up in Bromley, Kent. Her father was the financial director of an engineering firm and her mother worked in a baby clinic — a “very normal middle-class background”. However, she says she “had abstract erotic ideas” from the age of five that she didn’t come to recognise until doing a masters degree in philosophy aged 32. She considered herself a feminist from the age of 16, but instead of being anti-porn, she says: “I realised the way forward was to stop complaining about men’s freedoms and start working on my own.”

Her parents were not thrilled this meant making pornography. “My family have never seen any of my work. My dad is my company secretary and does the accounts, but we never talk about anything. My mum actively disliked it. We had a lot of arguments.”

Later it also meant trying to change Parliament from the inside out and in the 2010 general election she was Liberal Democrat candidate for Gravesend.

“I wanted to be an MP as I saw it as an extension of my work which is broadly about equality — representation of the female gaze in porn.” She didn’t win although she does say: “I may stand again in the future.”

The equality Arrowsmith strives for in her feminist pornography comes through the guidelines she sets, whichinclude casting attractive male actors, including an element of humour, ensuring eye contact between actors, lots of foreplay and keeping language in check. “Even if they are being rude to each other there is a line over which it becomes abusive or sexist,” she says. She also never sells films on a particular body part or sex act alone. “I think variety is important for women.” Perhaps most importantly, she ensures she shows “the female point of view camera angle — looking at the man a lot of the time. I think a lot of what is seen as misogynistic [in porn] actually isn’t. It’s just a male point of view. The camera angles are all from the men.”

Arrowsmith’s is the kind of porn of which one imagines Caitlin Moran might approve. In her book, How to Be a Woman, she rejects the notion that porn is innately sexist. “The act of having sex isn’t sexist so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist,” she writes, and has said she thinks that in feminist pornography: “You’d see a woman come. Really come. And it would be amazing.”

Well, in Anna Span porn the women do come. Although I’m not sure “amazing” is the word. Yet to her credit, Arrowsmith’s movies boast decent statistics. She has a 45 per cent female audience. Not equal, but closer than most. “I used to say I made porn for women ... very quickly I realised I was actually making it from a female perspective. Men and women’s tastes aren’t mutually exclusive. If a man and woman can have sex together and enjoy it, they can watch the same film of a man and woman having sex together and enjoy it.”

At the moment Arrowsmith is enjoying a hiatus from porn. She is studying for a PhD in gender studies and has been “relying on VOD [video on demand] deals and I have not had to work for three years,” proving that porn makes her plenty of money — although she won’t say how much. Her husband is also currently doing a PhD. The pair met on Guardian Soulmates and married in 2008. They “weren’t able to have children, unfortunately”, and Arrowsmith says “the dogs are like our children”. Had she had children, Arrowsmith “wouldn’t have a problem” with explaining her career to them. “I think it’s pretty easy to do. It’s just about framing it and I would be bringing children up to be responsible.”

In fact, part of her feminist standpoint is about insisting a woman can be all and many things. “I’m a porn director who thinks she has the right to stand for Parliament, who does a PhD. If I were a porn star I would say I have every right to be considered a good mother and to be a good person and to be able to be faithful outside of work to a husband.” But the issue of pornography’s effect on children is pertinent. Reports yesterday quoted the findings of a children’s watchdog that every boy aged 14 in one school had watched pornography. Surveys have also shown 11 is the average age for a boy to start viewing porn.

Arrowsmith is strident about this. “Nobody in the industry markets to underage people. We don’t want young people consuming pornography ... We have said to the Government what they need to do, which is shut down these free sites such as Red Tube, which is where they are all getting it from ... We need education in schools about pornography. The Government needs to make decent sexual education compulsory, which includes talking about images.”

In the meantime, however, aren’t young people growing up with an expectation that sex should be fetishised and women waxed all over?

Arrowsmith explains the fad for hair removal in the porn industry came from the desire to get a better shot of the essential organs. “It’s a fashion,” she says, and “you have men shaving themselves as well as a result of the porn industry.” When Arrowsmith says, “Do we think women are disempowered because they shave their armpits? No, it’s not relevant,” I suggest that most of Western society — men and women — expresses revulsion even at hairy legs on a woman. “We never frame that discourse about legs in the same way as one about men shaving their faces,” she argues. “Why should men be seen as dirty if they don’t shave their faces?”

Arrowsmith also notes a collation of data about US porn actors which showed that “the average female porn star is 24 years old with brown hair and a B-cup”. Indeed she claims that porn creates a “democratisation of the body”.

“Unlike all other media forms, the porn industry will absolutely show anything,” she says. “I always say to women, if there’s something you don’t like about your body, put it into a search engine, add the word porn and you will find a load of sites where that is the most attractive thing about you — whether you are very hairy, or very fat or an amputee. There is [a kind of porn] for every preference.”

Arrowsmith rejects the idea that porn changes our perception of normal sex. “We get accused of saying porn is real sex, but it’s an illogical argument — like going up to a comedian who makes funny films and saying, ‘It’s not fair, you make life look much funnier than it is and I’m depressed in comparison to your funny film, and that’s your fault’.” James Deen has expressed a similar sentiment, calling pornography “stunt style sex” and likening it to a stunt motorbike ride in an action movie.

But what about the influence of porn on her own sex life? “When I first started doing it I would have to stop myself from thinking, when I was having sex with my boyfriend, ‘That’s a good camera angle’. The only other restriction on my sex life is that I don’t watch any British porn because I recognise people and I’m not into voyeurism. It makes you feel like you’re watching your mates shag.”

I can see that. I certainly wouldn’t ever want to see a friend of mine doing what I’ve just watched happen in the A and O Department.

The Intelligence Squared debate “Pornography is good for us: without it we would be a far more repressed society” takes place on April 23 (intelligencesquared.com)